Raymond Smullyan
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Raymond Merrill Smullyan (born 1919) is a mathematician, logician and magician.
Born in Far Rockaway, New York, he is the author of many books on recreational mathematics, recreational logic, etc. Most notably, one is titled What is the name of this book?. It would hardly be considered a spoiler to reveal that the name of the book is, in fact, What is the name of this book?.
Many of his logic problems are extensions of classic puzzles. Those involving knights (who always tell the truth) and knaves (who always lie) are based on the story of the two doors & two guards, one who lies and one who doesn't. One door leads to heaven and one to hell, and the puzzle is to find out which door leads to heaven by asking one of the guards a question. One way to do this is to ask "Which door would the other guard say leads to hell?".
In more complex puzzles, he introduces characters who may lie or tell the truth (referred to as "normals"), and furthermore instead of answering "yes" or "no", use words which mean "yes" or "no", but the reader does not know which word means which. In his Transylvania puzzles, half of the inhabitants are insane, and believe only false things, whereas the other half are sane and believe only true things. In addition, humans always tell the truth, and vampires always lie. For example, an insane vampire will believe a false thing (2 + 2 is not 4) but will then lie about it, and say that it is. A sane vampire knows 2 + 2 is 4, but will lie and say it isn't. And mutatis mutandis for humans. Thus everything said by a sane human or an insane vampire is true, while everything said by an insane human or a sane vampire is false.
His book Forever Undecided popularises Gödel's incompleteness theorems by phrasing them in terms of reasoners and their beliefs, rather than formal systems and what can be proved in them. For example, if a native of a knight/knave island says to a sufficiently self-aware reasoner "You will never believe that I am a knight", the reasoner cannot believe either that the native is a knight or that he is a knave without becoming inconsistent (i.e. holding two contradictory beliefs). The equivalent theorem is that for any formal system S, there exists a mathematical statement which can be interpreted as "This statement is not provable in formal system S". If the system S is consistent, neither the statement nor its opposite will be provable in it.
Apart from writing about and teaching logic, Smullyan has recently released a recording of his favourite classical piano pieces by composers such as Bach, Scarlatti and Schubert. He has also written an autobiography titled Some Interesting Memories: A Paradoxical Life.
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Selected publications
Popular
- The Tao is Silent
- The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes
- The Chess Mysteries of the Arabian Knights
- The Lady or the Tiger?
- The Riddle of Scheherazade
- This Book Needs No Title
- Alice in Puzzle-land
- What Is the Name of This Book?
- Forever Undecided
- To Mock a Mockingbird
- Satan, Cantor and Infinity
- Some Interesting Memories: A Paradoxical Life
- Who Knows?
Academic
External links
- Raymond Smullyan's website at Indiana University. [1] (http://www.indiana.edu/~alldrp/members/smullyan.html)
- At The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive. [2] (http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Smullyan.html)
- At The Mathematics Genealogy Project. [3] (http://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/html/id.phtml?id=8027)
External references
- Is God a Taoist? by Raymond Smullyan, 1977. [4] (http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html)
- Planet Without Laughter by Raymond Smullyan, 1980. [5] (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/smullyan.html)
- An Epistemological Nightmare by Raymond Smullyan, 1982. [6] (http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/epistemologicalNightmare.html)de:Raymond Smullyan